You won't get far developing a game without food.
You won't get far developing a game without electricity.
If you're working full-time to pay for the above you don't have much free time - sure it might get finished eventually, but if your players want to see it finished this decade you need a way to pay for food and electricity while also spending lots of time on development. Alpha funding allows this to happen, and I'm proud to be supporting it :)
On this:
* Let the team debate and finally decide on key issues. (Crimson Crow was usually swayed by who was doing most at the time.)
This is why I believe mod teams more or less have to be dictatorships. If you don't have one strong vision for people to follow, it see-saws from one design dead-end to another. It's also why the team leader needs to work their balls off ( thus earning the right to make the decisions by merit of doing most of the work ;) )
What about an invite-only alpha? That will help avoid mass "THIS SUX!!!11!1!!" spam from people who don't understand what an alpha is, while allowing for fresh opinions to be fed into the dev process. Yay/Nay?
No, my avatar is shameless self promotion - it's the Skrake from v2 of Killing Floor (which is the version I worked on :D )
Thing is, I see the friend analogy more like this:
Your best friend has stuck with you and supported you through thick and thin - he really is everything a friend should be. Then one day, instead of greeting you with a cheery 'hi buddy', he greets you by kicking you square in the balls.
At this point, do you continue as you were for the sake of old times, or has something changed, and your opinion is going to change with it? L4D2 is that kick in the balls - Valve just aren't acting like the Valve we thought we knew.
I think you read 'development progress' back to front. They just want proof that it's not pure vapourware - a finished mod proves that it isn't vapourware ;)
Work in progress shots are only needed for unfinished mods.
The potential is there, but it feels like too early a build to say anything useful about it. I will download future versions when there's something to get my teeth into and give constructive feedback on though :)
Sweet! If I'm sensible and go to sleep, I'll miss all the slow and Moddb will be awesome when I wake up :)
I have toyed with the idea, but always find it hard to start writing without someone else starting the topic off. I've always been like that - when I was at uni, I always preferred practicals to written work. Proper employment is great - all I have to do is make it work, it doesn't need a 2000 word essay along side it any more :D
The Zombie Apocalypse? What's that?
Elzzu looks like it's coming along nicely, but I have been utterly distracted by that teaser in the gametypes list ;)
I thought page three was a bit too deep and overcomplicated for most mod teams - it doesn't need to be so formal in a small team. Might be valid for one of the few really large mod teams though.
The rest of it is spot on though - if all bug reports were done to this standard I'd be a very happy developer :)
Cool, very happy to see you responding intelligently to critisism :)
More thoughts:
An alternative to redesigning the levels would be to have a brief pause before you respawn the player. If you have animation and sound FX of the ball going pop as it dies, it would make the delay very natural. A short delay (less than a second) is usually enough to give players chance to release the key before play starts. Both ideas work, but there are stengths and weaknesses to both. What do you think?
An alternative for the timer proposal. Clocks don't just count down, they also count up. If you do this, speed runners can compete for lowest completion times without forcing everyone to play against the clock. Do you think this is a better plan?
Hope you don't mind me throwing ideas in. I'm enjoying taking an interest in the development, and I very much hope I'm being useful!
OK, constructive criticism time!
1. A few times I have died while holding the right key, and then died again as the start point is next to a deathball. Is there anything you can do about this?
2. It's easy enough to complete if you are patient, but it also seems a bit boring playing that way. What do you think about adding an element of time pressure?
Please don't see this as a negative. I'm posing questions that I hope will get you thinking like a game designer ;)
OLDSKOOL :D
I can remember when all games looked like this, and playing Balls Game did put a smile on my face. You've got the basics there, looking forward to seeing where you go with this!
You can listen in without signing up, but joining the text chat needs a ustream login. You only need Skype if you want to speak on the program.
(I know because I played Guinea Pig for them this morning :) )
Yeah, it's pretty basic, but it is finished. That makes it 1000% times better than a lot of projects out there :)
What are your future plans? will you extend this into a bigger game, or move on to a new project?
That is some very impressive stuff. Damn you for teasing us with the intro to the beach/jungle level and then not showing us the rest of it! ;) I want to see that level properly
Got to applaud the technical polish, but have to agree with everyone else who feels this is about as 'deep' as the conversation in most wannnabe-arty student coffee shops.
It's a noble enough message, but you get said message within the first five minutes, then the next seven just repeat it endlessly and add absolutely nothing new :(
Screenshots are meant to provide a quick preview. By the time I've watched the video I could have downloaded most of the map - not exactly a quick preview, is it?
Good to see you on the Moddb crew. I'm looking forward to seeing the surprises that you are working on :D
Would it be cynical to remind them that April 1st isn't for another four months? Hey, if it releases and it's fun, that's cool :) But I just can't take anything they promise seriously anymore :(
Very good news - one of the big reasons I missed v3 has now been put to rest :D
@varsity - most (if not all) of the icons are the desktop shortcuts that come with the game. If they are ugly, blame the game devs, not Moddb ;)
Why do so many people seem to think this is a recruitment thread? The image of big-name studio executives looking for new hires in the comments thread of a moddb poll is so ludicrous it's funny :rolleyes:
@smoochy666
what's better than having a team of university-graduates helping you? Not caring about accuracy and still making lots of money. The harsh truth is that unless you can answer that question, you won't have much business.
That's still a pile of crap. Where are these miraculous indie projects that are delivering the gameplay nirvana you speak of? You talk in grand sweeping terms, but don't offer any actual games that fulfil the vision you describe. Anyway, good game is a good game, no matter who provided the technology that powers it. Gamers don't really care. If you have the desire to make a game, you want the best tools available, and I haven't seen any Open Source solutions that get you up and running as fast as Unreal does. Why suffer by using the lesser option?
As for the commercial side, modding is about the games - not about getting rich. It doesn't matter that you aren't allowed to sell your work. Plus, the community around the original game provides a lot of easy promotion - again, if you care about giving people a good game and don't have some half-baked idea about getting rich, modding will get your game to a very large audience with far less effort than a standalone engine.
It seems you are as bothered about the potential to make money as you are about the gameplay. There's nothing wrong with wanting to earn a living, but when it comes to doing it for the love of gaming, modding is as pure as it gets. It's all about giving people something to play that you hope they'll enjoy. You want to talk freedom? Mods are only limited by your skills and effort. No commercial restraints whatsoever. Not everyone takes advantage of this potential, but it is there. If you want to build innovative gameplay, you want an engine that lets you get straight down to building new gameplay rather than building editors or renderers. You want no commercial pressures shaping your design. Modding gives you exactly that :)
@Monochrome_
That is an utter pile of crap. If I want to make a game, you think I should have to build the renderer, editor, tools pipeline, AI subsystems, networking and a whole lot more from scratch? Why, when they have already been made for me? I could spend years doing all that, or I can have a mod done in six months. They'll both look and play the same, but one gets finished in a fraction of the time. Why is that so wrong?
Mods can be more innovative because all those basic elements are already done. You get straight to adding new features rather than reinventing the wheel again and again.
Also, all those mods that fail as mods would fail even quicker if they tried to build from scratch. If they can't manage to finish a project on a working engine, what hope would they have on a half finished engine and tools?
Let me turn it around: if Counterstrike isn't a big enough innovator, what game is? Now it's been cloned to death and overrun by the worst sort of noob, but when it was new it was very different. If it isn't enough then what commercial project do you consider significant enough to qualify?
Sounds like you're raising the bar so high that no-one can rise above it, be they mod or commercial project -_-
Can this scale down to internet play, or are the bandwidth demands so big that it has to be LAN only?
Halo totally changed the way games are? Really? It's a fun enough shooter, but it did absolutely nothing new. Much as I'm no Counterstrike fan, CS innovated way more than Halo did.
I'm going to guess that you are a lot younger than myself, and that Halo was one of the first, if not the very first FPS you ever played. When you're old enough to remember when Doom was new and exciting, Halo doesn't seem so special ;)
Gibberstein
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